


2B2T In Space: The General Experience Of EVE Online

by QuickTimeEvents



Category: EVE Online
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29362176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickTimeEvents/pseuds/QuickTimeEvents
Kudos: 1





	2B2T In Space: The General Experience Of EVE Online

Online open worlds are always fascinating to witness. Worlds like this go far beyond the player-game relationship by directly incorporating intra-community interaction into the game itself. The game imposes rules on the players, then the players impose rules and ethics upon themselves, akin to the genesis of real-world societies. With that in mind, this essay will explore my general impressions of EVE Online.  
Right away, the first thing any new player will notice is the uniquely complex control scheme. Most games, you can just jump in and start pressing buttons until something eventually works. Not this one. The action in this game consists mainly of trawling through fully searchable databases of locations, entities, tasks, and tradable items and choosing actions to perform upon or near these items. Every type of task or item in this game has its own database, its own way of finding it. If you’re going trading, know where the Market tab is. If you’re going hunting, know where the Bounty Offices are, and keep an eye on the entity list. If you’re exploring, keep your Core Scanners in your hotbar. There are a lot of different types of databases to keep track of, every one of them is suited to the things they are meant to look for, and all of them are chock-full of stuff, meaning there are a lot of different techniques to learn. In the Core Scanners, patience is key. Mid-combat targeting requires speed and precise technique. An effective trade requires research and persistence. Fortunately, the community of EVE Online treats newbies with the highest respect, and are more than eager to help. I myself am an alumnus of EVE University, a wiki page that I highly recommend to anybody looking to start out in one of New Eden’s many trades.  
Most discussions of this game tend to focus on the economy and corporations of New Eden, earning it the reputation of “Spreadsheets In Space.” I personally don’t play MMOs specifically for the trading aspect; however, the one in EVE Online is exceptionally well-handled and worth talking about, so I’m gonna. The economy of New Eden is handled almost exclusively by player characters. If a player has something they want, or indeed something they don’t, they can put it on a list along with the amount of money they think is worth trading hands, and eventually somebody will come along and decide that it’s worth taking you up. Now, for reasons that I will get into shortly, CCP cannot take direct action to regulate this, so instead they’ve implemented two interesting game design choices for indirect market regulation. The first is that every resource in the game can be obtained by any player without having to purchase it.What players are really paying for is the opportunity to obtain items without having to harvest the materials and craft them on their own. Therefore, if somebody charges too much, players can just take their business elsewhere or just go mining. The second regulation is a system of taxes and trader fees. There are, of course, ways to circumvent this, but none that would be accessible to low-level characters, and certainly none with loopholes that would allow anybody to essentially print money and get away with it. Basically put, when you buy something, you pay a tax for it, and when you sell something, the station charges you for the privilege of selling at that exact station. This creates an inescapable punishment for unethical business practices, as attempting to short a product will get your profits cut off by the taxes, and attempting to rip off one’s buyers will result in the station ripping off the seller. All in all, the balanced realism of this game’s economy is highly commendable.  
Once you’re done trading and getting rich, there is a game to play, a universe to explore, and people to meet, and perchance to kill or befriend, which is, in the end, why I personally love this game. While doing so, I have noticed something interesting. You see, there is a system of regulations in place in this game, but whereas most developers would roll back the server or ban accounts for infractions, effectively smiting players who misbehave, CCP has implemented the aforementioned taxation system, while also employing NPCs as police officers and making it perfectly legal to hunt and kill players who step out of line. Essentially, as long as you can evade or kill the police, you can get away with whatever you want. This leads to a very interesting pattern of behavior, especially among high-level players. Permanent structures near the origin system are raided top-to-bottom, leaving most players reliant on procedurally generated content and specific items which respawn for the sole purpose of tutorial gameplay. Fort Knocks, property of Hard Knocks, was remodelled in a trillion-ISK project into a fully functional Death Star, complete with its own superlaser, then moved to an isolated, low-reward system, simply so Hard Knocks could lay claim to an entire system.Most recently, at M2-XFE, the super-capitol forces of the Imperium and PAPI, two player groups that had been at war for months, converged, and the full might of both armies crashing down upon each other didn’t just decimate the two opposing forces, it didn’t just constitute a loss of tens of thousands of trillions of ISK, it very nearly broke CCP’s servers, and was only mitigated by scheduled downtime the day after the battle. There is one other type of game that behaves like this, constructing massive superweapons just for bragging rights and bending and breaking the rules of the game along with the server, with consequences mainly coming in the form of game-breaking bugs and crashes. That type of game is a Minecraft anarchy server. Any time I see stories about the Immortality Machine, or 2B2T’s broken End Dragon fights, or even something as simple as dead bushes being banned, it reminds me of similar discourse about the way EVE Online is played.  
EVE Online has always strove for realism in its gameplay, marketplace, and regulations. Because of this, most of EVE Online’s rules can be bent and even broken by particularly egregious players and enterprises, leading to an atmosphere similar to that of a Minecraft anarchy server, complete with the feeling of terrible danger coupled with exhilarating freedom.


End file.
